OpinionWhy a half-pipe may be more than enough to smoke out the future for the Olympic Games
Youth desperately needs to be served and luckily China’s snowboarder Liu Jianyu and scintillating Asian-American Chloe Kim were up to the task
Forget the hair – what little you have left – forget the back, the knees and the hips as well. Forget all your chronic aches, pains and endless maladies because there is only one thing that defines a geezer: Do you watch the Winter Olympics? Cause if you do, you’re old.
The median age of those who watched the 2014 Sochi Winter Games on TV in the US was 55, a terrifyingly flat line demographic for the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Viewership among 18-30 year olds for the 2016 Rio summer games was down 30 per cent from London 2012. The numbers for the Winter Games are even worse, which is why back in 1998 at the Nagano Games, the IOC introduced snowboarding as a medal sport, despite the howls from Olympic royalists that they were letting reprobates with their hip hop music into the regal sanctum.
But what the IOC was letting in was not a generation of flunkey stoners, it was the future. Twenty years later on a radiantly crisp Korean day during the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Games, that future was on display for all to see.
Artistically, athletically, ethnically and generationally, the women’s half-pipe event was must viewing on so many levels. And who would have thunk that, considering the only thing us geezers know about a half-pipe is that it should be a full one. Still, anyone who dismissed this as a sub-sport is a fool.
Half-pipe is Cirque De Soleil on snow with riders flying some 20 metres high while twisting and gyrating before coming straight back down and doing it again and again. Needless to say, the high high-flying exploits of American Chloe Kim and China’s Jiayu Liu were mesmerising.